Nuclear Fusion in China

[rashidas]

Here is a link to a web posting on fusion development in China:

http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles_2011/Spring-2011/China_Fusion.pdf

Forgive me if this has been posted before.

[Ivy Matt]

Well, I hadn’t seen it before. It seems odd to me that, with all the money currently being thrown at the construction of roads, bridges, dams, apartment buildings, and so forth, that even conventional magnetic fusion has had difficulty finding funding in China. Smog is a real environmental problem in the eastern plains, and the sooner China can replace its coal plants with working fusion reactors, the better off a large portion of its population will be.

Nevertheless, if the Chinese are looking at any other options besides the tokamak, I am not aware of it.

[delt0r]

I don’t like doing the political bringer of doom, but the simple reason fusion gets low funding across the board is that coal and oil are cheap, and a few $M on “green” keeps the rest happy.

[Steven Sesselmann]

It’s hard to think of any other invention that has had that much money thrown at it, without ever having made a cent. The aeroplane, the automobil, the rocket engine, the computer, the fission reactor all required some R & D, but nothing like fusion. Most of those other inventions were making money long before they were mature.

There are two kinds of phycisists, those who are good at physics and those who are good at getting funding. Look at some of the rediculous projuect that have been funded, such as LIGO and the LHC and soon ITER, where governments have sunk billions into the project, only to be told in a billion page document how the negative outcome of the experiment was a great success, and that not finding gravity waves or Z bosons proves that we had it all wrong.

More funding does not make better physics, instead it requires a journey of the mind, by someone who dares to go where no academic goes, for fear of being rediculed by the pillars of academia.

Fusion will succeed, as a result of new understanding and not by building a bigger tokamak.

Steven

[delt0r]

I think you have vastly underestimated the size of some projects. For example the Manhattan project. Remember that ITER is 10billion over 20 years, not each year. Fusion does not get that much in the bigger scheme of things.

[Rezwan]

I’ll have to agree with Delt0r. Even further, breakthrough energy in general gets so little funding.

There are two kinds of physicists, those who are good at physics and those who are good at getting funding.

A more constructive way to put it is, there are 2 skill sets physicists need, good physics, and good fundraising. We need to work on the latter obviously.

The Focus Fusion Society, as part of its strategic plan, has a “financing fusion research” campaign.

It’s mission? “To bring stakeholders together to provide fusion researchers with the broadest possible funding base; to make the case for funding a diversified, “multi-target” approach to fusion; and to provide a broader range of people and organizations the opportunity to make a difference in creating our fusion future.”

I say it’s best to start with pointing out how little funding fusion gets, and then on top of that, how many other opportunities there are (other projects) that could make a difference.

[Tulse]

Steven Sesselmann wrote: Look at some of the rediculous projuect that have been funded, such as LIGO and the LHC and soon ITER, where governments have sunk billions into the project, only to be told in a billion page document how the negative outcome of the experiment was a great success, and that not finding gravity waves or Z bosons proves that we had it all wrong.

That’s precisely how good science works, by ruling out possibilities. It’s silly to say that LIGO and LHC are failures because they did not confirm existing theories (and it is way too early to say that LHC is a failure even by that criterion).

You might as well say that the Michelson-Morley apparatus was a failure because it didn’t demonstrate the luminiferous aether.

I also think it is hugely important to distinguish between basic science and more applied or practical science. LIGO and LHC are designed to answer fundamental questions about the universe, whereas ITER is designed with a far more practical final goal, to produce fusion energy. Sure, it involves a lot of theoretical physics to do so, but the ultimate aim is very pragmatic. To me it makes far more sense to criticize such practically-targeted projects when they are spending huge amounts of money with no results, since such negative outcomes are antithetical to the final goal, unlike in basic science, where a null result can be hugely informative.

[delt0r]

In ITERs defense, they kinda of need to build it first. The cost overruns to date have been from politics not the science delaying the construction so long (almost a decade). In fact that is perhaps the biggest problem with ITER, too many cooks in the kitchen, and some of these cooks are not scientists.

I know traditional fusion is a dirty word here, but if we are going to be talking about practical output you are going to have to acknowledge that these machines are getting the closest to breakeven than anything else (Lawsons criteria etc). When the tomakak was reviled by the Russians, it was 100x better than anything else, so good that the rest of the world did not believe them. It wasn’t until western scientists went and took their own measurements before they believed them. In the last 40 years confinement has improved as much as computer power has over the same time period.

Or perhaps by results you mean profit or some other metric (a working power station)? Be careful here, you may just give a metric that Focus Fusion does very poorly at, even worse than ITER and there kin.

[Steven Sesselmann]

Thanks for your opinions…,
I am not suggesting that fusion gets too much funding, clearly energy research should feature much higher on the list of funded projects, I do still believe that some of the big projects are white elephants.
Politicians rely on scientists to advise them on weather or not a project should get funding, and I doubt that too many politicians actually go through the science in detail and try to understand what they are approving money for, and the reason is that no one person is responsible, it’s a group decision and one can get the blame.
LIGO is one of those projects that should never have had funding, the physics was flawed to begin with, and nobody wants to admit it.

Steven

[Lerner]

In reply to delt0r the tokamaks don’t do all that well in the metric that really counts which is total fusion energy out over total (or “wall-plug”) energy in. For DD the best results in tokamak are 1 joule of fusion for 100,000 joules of total input. The best results for dense plasma focus (not ours yet!) are almost exactly the same. DPFs cost about 1,000 times less than tokamaks. The fusion effort would have been much less costly if funds had been spread over a wide range of devices, rather than concentrated on one–the most expensive.

[Steven Sesselmann]

I agree totally, and I have suggested this before. Imagine if the 10 bn dollars were invested in 100 different fusion ideas, and trust me, there are at least 100 patented ideas on fusion, some more stupid than others. A lot would be learned and the odds would be better.

Further, if all these different approaches to fusion were done under one roof, a lot of duplication could be avoided. The vacuum systems and the measuring equipment is almost identical in all cases.

[Lerner]

Right! We sure could have arrived at the perfect design for fast, high current swtiches by now! A lot of work involves re-inventing the wheel because the proejcts are so small and understaffed. By “one roof” I assume you mean a unified project, not literally a single location. That would be a bit extreme–a global effort is a better use of the talent available.

[Steven Sesselmann]

Lerner wrote: Right! We sure could have arrived at the perfect design for fast, high current swtiches by now!

Are you still struggling with those switches…?

The requirement of such high currents worry me, what is the Q ratio of input vs. output for your best run?

Do you see light at the end of the tunnel?

I am currently in the process of setting up a new lab at home for my next fusion invention called F.I.C.S. fusion (Fusion Induced Charge Separation), the patent app is due for publication in January. F.I.C.S. if it works as anticipated, will only require a small charge to initiate the fusion reaction, once the reaction starts, it will hopefully run on it’s own, without any input whatsoever, and it might even produce a surplus electric current.

I attach a picture of my lab as it looked a week ago, as you can see it already has first plasma 🙂

Steven

Attached files

[delt0r]

Clearly diversity in funding is a much better idea. Many of the mainstream fusion folk have been making the same claim. Personally if we are serious about our energy future (and by future I mean >100 years) then some serious money should be put into energy and in particular nuclear (yea.. both fission and fusion–we want something that burns bombs 🙂 ).

Also the energy per neutron is a awful metric, I think beam target neutrons sources do much better for example, and IEC probably do better as well. Neither is going to lead real energy output.

[Tulse]

Presumably the most appropriate metric in the end is (likely) cost per kilowatt/hour of generated electricity. That’s what really ultimately matters, and that captures all the “overhead” that tokamaks and other similarly-sized approaches have (e.g., large capital investment, dealing with radiation from neutronic reactions, inefficiencies in using radiation to heat fluid to boil water to create steam to drive turbines to turn generators, etc. etc. etc.).

[Author]

Posts